


Her Best Chance

by icewhisper



Series: Leonard Snart Shorts [7]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen, Lewis Snart's A+ Parenting, first meeting AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-17
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-12-03 08:46:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11528724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icewhisper/pseuds/icewhisper
Summary: They took Lisa away when he was fourteen. By the time he found her again, she wasn't Lisa Snart anymore.





	Her Best Chance

**Author's Note:**

> Written as part of my writing blog, [leonardsnartwrites](https://leonardsnartwrites.tumblr.com/). Normally, it would have been posted under the collections fic, [Leonard Snart Shorts](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10837056). This will probably become a verse of its own.
> 
> Anonymous prompt: Mick meets Lisa first.

The cops took Lisa away when he was in juvie for the third time. He came back with Lewis’ hand gripping his arm hard enough to bruise, wild eyes searching the living room for brown curls and a happy cry of his name.

Nothing came.

His heart dropped into his stomach, even as he tried to tell himself that it was fine. She was fine. She was probably with their grandfather, curled up at the old house in the slightly less crappy part of Central or riding around in the elderly man’s ice cream truck. He told himself that for the first day, the second, and the third. By the fourth, he was too sick with worry to eat.

He called his grandfather when his dad wasn’t looking, fingers curled tight over the phone, and felt a little bit of his world break. Gone. CPS. Foster care. Lewis had gone after her with a broken beer bottle. Thirty-six stitches in her shoulder. Equally corrupt cops kept him from facing charges for it, but Lisa was removed from the house. His grandfather had lost track of her almost immediately.

“I’m so sorry, Leonard.”

She was gone.

He was back in juvie a month later.

 

 

He didn’t find her until he was nineteen and, by then, Lisa Snart had been formally adopted by a foster family and become Lisa Rory.

He took the file from the hacker he’d paid way too much to track her down and drove to Keystone, winding through unfamiliar roads in a stolen car. The baseball cap stayed tilted over his face when he walked up the long driveway to the farm and ducked behind a tractor. She was there, pretty brown curls tied up into braids he’d never quite learned how to do for her. Smiling. Laughing. She chased after some other kids while a dog barked from its bed on the porch.

And just like that, all thoughts of squirreling her away vanished.

She was happy, safe and whole in ways he’d never be. Running around like that ugly scar on her shoulder was no different than the little smattering of freckles he remembered her having on her ankle.

He let out a breath that was more shaky than not and kept watching. The sun shifted. The games the kids were playing changed. She never once looked towards the tractor he was hiding behind, not even when an older woman called them all in for dinner and she gave the front yard a final glance.

“Let me guess,” someone said behind him, “Lenny?”

He went stiff, hand drifting back towards the gun he usually kept at his waist. It wasn’t there, he reminded himself with a curse. He’d left it back at his crappy apartment, because guns and Lisa were two words he didn’t want in the same sentence. He turned on his heel, jaw tight and hands held out.

A boy his age stared back at him, hands shoved into back pockets of torn jeans and a worn flannel shirt hanging open. One of the kids, he remembered as he mentally sorted through the file the hacker had given him, the oldest one. Michael Rory, goes by Mick. Sought treatment for pyromania a few years back and prescribed a handful of prescriptions Len couldn’t recall.

“Lisa’s got an old picture of you,” Mick continued when Len didn’t offer a reply. “Keeps it next to her bed. You’re scrawnier in the picture.” He hummed when Len sucked a breath in through his teeth. Tried to remember the picture she might have had, because they’d only ever had a couple, but nothing came to mind.

Mick stared at him, calculating and surveying in ways that Len normally would have admired. Good attention to detail. Keeps calm. An obsession with fire—pyromania, his mind corrected—was potentially problematic, but could also be an ace in the hole for certain jobs. Another time, another place, Mick might actually have made him a good partner. Instead, the other teen was staring at the healing bruise on his jaw and the sleeves he kept pulled over his hands like it was a neon sign announcing that he hadn’t fully escaped his father yet.

He never could have taken Lisa with him, he realized and thought he might have felt his heart break a little. Even if she’d been willing to leave this family…

“Don’t tell her I was here.” It was supposed to come out firm, more of a command than the whispered plea it ended up being.

Mick raised an eyebrow. “You’re the one that tracked her down.”

“I needed to know she was safe,” he said and glanced back towards the house. There was a goodbye resting on his tongue, but he swallowed it back. Whispering out into the dying day was too sentimental for someone like him.

Mick was staring at him with sympathy when he looked back. “She misses you,” he told Len. “She’d wanna know you were here.”

“I’m a criminal,” he returned. “She’s better off.” He pushed off from the tractor, tugging the hat further over his face. “Watch out for her for me?”

“She’s my sister too,” Mick replied and gave an apologetic grimace when Len’s breath shuddered. “Sorry. I just… I’ll take care of her.”

Len murmured a thank you before he left and made the long walk back to the car.

It was dark by the time he found the strength to drive away.

The End

**Author's Note:**

> Please don't mind the change in fic titles. I realized after the fact that I already had a fic with a similar title.


End file.
